


What Rough Beast

by vibishan



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel, Punisher (Comics)
Genre: M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, of various degrees
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2016-03-29
Packaged: 2018-05-04 20:57:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5348285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vibishan/pseuds/vibishan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After - after the pair of them are captured by criminals and forced to have sex - Matt copes. Frank doesn't.</p><p>(Written for the kink meme prompt <a href="http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/5006.html?thread=10069134#cmt10069134">here</a>, although I've ignored most of the thread that spun off from it.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rape, rape trauma/recovery, internal victim-blaming, and various other unhealthy attitudes toward rape are the main focus of this fic, although the initial rape itself is not depicted graphically/in detail. Frank is drugged and believes himself to be a perpetrator rather than a victim; Matt is physically restrained and has larger issues in terms of how he relates to his body and a habit of confronting things head on come hell or high water. Neither of them have very much sophisticated sensitivity beyond 'rape is BAD.' There is some suicidal ideation, although the fic won't contain any actual attempts.
> 
> Please take care of yourselves.

Frank laughs at Daredevil once, early on in their acquaintance, a noise that takes him by surprise when it rips out of him, harsh and bright, like sun-warmed concrete, when he really gets that Daredevil _means_ it, about the no-kill code. He’s thought about it and danced up to it and seen the other side and then stepped back. Reigned in, before it was too late. Wants to keep it that way.

He tilts his head in a way Frank mostly associates with birds, although that might also just be the way he’s perching on the fire escape. _Why is that funny_ , he means, and Frank doesn’t make him say it out loud.

“You want to win a war without actually fighting one.” It’s awful, it’s doomed, it comes from some raw irrational blackbox of conviction that _everyone_ who does what they do has, deep down. Daredevil’s box just contains a few more catastrophic gaps between cause and effect than most. It’s funny because it’s true.

“I just want to protect my home,” he answers, and he sounds a little strangled, like he couldn’t decide whether he was going for growly contradiction or sad puppy, and ended up stranded in between the two.

“Hate to break it to you,” Frank tells him, and the scoffing comes out softer than he means it to, but not by much. “But that’s the oldest war there is.”

“I’m not a soldier,” Daredevil says. There’s a mulishness to it, over-enunciated, rote cadence, like he’s said it before, like Frank isn’t the only person he’s talking to. Frank doesn’t especially care.

“Then maybe you should stop wearing a uniform.”

He will think of that moment, later, when they’re cutting Daredevil’s armor off piece by piece, a wicked little switchblade sliding right into the panel seams he needs for all his twisting and flipping. The guy doing it is skilled, leaves deliberate cuts that are shallow and even, the ghostly outline of the costume redrawn on his naked body, still in red. Like someone’s trying to make a point: that this is still Daredevil, that it is the devil this is happening to, happening for. Because he put it on and stood up to them; they carve it off and lay him down.

(This is, presumably, also why they leave the mask on, and the gloves, and the boots. It should look ridiculous. It looks – obscene.)

Frank will already be drugged by then, his thoughts coming in gasps and flashes, like reflected glare slicing between skyscrapers. Everything is too hot, too close, too much, and he can feel that old beast of a laugh shaking its mane and stretching its legs in his chest as he realizes what they’re doing. It doesn’t leap for his throat, doesn’t come prowling out, but he wonders if Daredevil can hear it anyway, the way his breathing trips and stumbles when that lazy vicious laughs wends its way around his ribs.

*

Frank doesn’t make it back to a safehouse that night.

Whatever they gave him – the come-down isn’t like being hungover. Not cotton-stuffed, rotting, battered; instead his head feels full of bullet-proof glass, riddled with cracks, clear and skewed and grinding. He feels tacky, everywhere, and every time he licks his lips there’s too much salt. He remembers the sweat dripping down his face, down Daredevil’s _back_ -

Daredevil scrambled out of sight about thirty seconds after Frank managed to fumble the chains off. (Old-fashioned inch-thick manacles instead of regular cuffs, like something out of a medieval dungeon, he had to pick them with a bent _nail_ pried out of the warehouse floor after their captors made the mistake of leaving for a few hours in a clatter of buckles and tripod legs.) Daredevil shuddered away when Frank covered him with his jacket, but at least he took it before bolting to the door and melting into the shadows, at least he was – okay _enough_ , to do it, didn’t even stumble.

Since then he’s been walking. Just – there’s no thought behind it other than _away_ , as though he can ever leave this behind. He just. Walks, and walks. Takes a random turn when the neighborhood looks too nice. Remembers, a little before dawn, when some yuppie jogger gives him an alarmed look, to duck behind a dumpster and flip his shirt inside-out over the vest, leaving only black and old stains. His hands don’t shake. He hunches his shoulders a little higher and keeps walking.

(There are sharks that die if they stop moving. That suffocate. The morning rush rises around him like a tide. Breathe in, breathe out. Left, right, left.)

He crisscrosses Manhattan. If it were a labyrinth instead of a grid he could get lost in it. He weaves through the crowds, touches no one, avoids people’s eyes. Just one step after another.

When the sun is high and savage, the food trucks and hot dog stands sprout like dandelions from the sidewalk cracks; Frank’s stomach growls and then heaves. He keeps walking. He walks until he can’t tell one ache from another, until his body is a weary blur, until his vision wavers in front of him, long shadows swaying like blown curtains. He walks until he trips over a crate near the mouth of an alley, goes sprawling, falls hard, and his head swims when he tries to hitch himself upright again. His palms are scraped raw against the brick he didn’t quite catch himself on, and it’s – not enough, not near enough, he wants the skin to peel right off.

He curls up against the building, shoves his stinging hands into the opposite armpits, lets himself drift, dazed. He dreams of his hands curling around the bare curve of Daredevil’s arms, clutching his hips, wakes gasping again and again, scrubs the crusting blood and the raw skin beneath it on his jeans. No one bothers him, of course: he looks homeless and crazy, and that’s the easiest way to turn invisible. If he does it long enough, it almost feels like it might erase him altogether, the weight of seven million strangers’ determined disregard. But he knows, in the pit of his stomach, that it’s not that easy. Some things don’t erase.

(He’s always known that. But until now, all the stains on his soul, all the things he could never take back were things he knew he could live with.)

*

Matt breaks into Foggy’s apartment wearing bloody scraps and the Punisher’s too-large jacket. The smells of smoke and gunpowder residue and oil and sweat are seeped into the leather, archaeological layers, almost enough to drown out the reek of sex from underneath it. Blood is pervasive, but Matt’s used to that.

 _The mind controls the body_ , he thinks, not shivering. It doesn’t even hurt that badly. Not compared to some of the injuries he’s had.

He lets Foggy check his cuts and the sores on his wrists and ankles, even though none of them are deep, and swab them down with peroxide. The way it fizzes tears through everything else in static-y little blips, the burning ache and the rumble of periodic late-night/early-morning traffic and the sleeptalking of the girl two apartments down, mumbling about dragons.

“Should I – I don’t have a proper kit but – evidence –”

“It doesn’t matter,” Matt says. His voice sounds like somebody else’s, like it’s echoing in a bigger space than Foggy’s apartment.

“Buddy –” Foggy’s biting his lip, sucking in a breath; a tiny bit of air whistles between his front teeth. “Just because you were out doing – you know – it doesn’t mean we can’t prosecute–”

“ _No_ , Foggy.” It’s the first time he’s said it all night; the first time he imagined it might make a difference. And Foggy, bless him, takes him at his word, lets him get clean without any further considerations. He’s not in shock – or, well, maybe he is, because Foggy is tugging him up, leading him to the shower, and he’s not sure how long he would have just sat there, otherwise, stinking and staining things, but it’s not a _decision_ made out of shock. He knows whose DNA it is. That isn’t going to help bring anyone who did this to justice.

Foggy pulls him out of the shower when the water gets cold, when Matt wouldn’t have – bothered. Gently bullies him into toweling himself off and borrowing Foggy’s softest pajamas, ancient well-worn things that smell like fresh detergent and Foggy, and nudges him to the bed, tucks him in like a child. Matt catches his wrist.

“Stay,” he says, and he knows he’s holding on too tightly, but Foggy doesn’t complain or pull away. “Take your shirt off,” he adds, as Foggy climbs in next to him, too wrung out to reconsider the request, and Foggy’s pulse skitters, confused and nervy and cautious. He wants so badly not to hurt Matt more. Matt wants to wrap himself up in that until he can’t feel anything else.

“Are you –” _sure_ , Foggy is kind enough not to finish. “Just –”

“You don’t feel anything like him,” Matt says, and his voice cracks a little bit. But he says it, the closest he can come to admitting what Foggy must already know from the state of him, because he doesn’t want Foggy to worry more than he has to. Because it’s true, and maybe _that_ feels steadier said aloud, reliable: Foggy is gently soft with body fat, mostly smooth-chested rather than hairy, _comfortable_. His skin is smooth too, the only spot of callous at the first joint of his third finger, from writing instead of hurting people. He has a couple moles for punctuation, like inverted dimples, and not one scrawling scar.

“Okay,” Foggy says, “Okay,” and Matt eventually lets go his wrist long enough to let Foggy obey, then wriggles close and plasters himself against Foggy’s front, tucks his face into the crook of Foggy’s neck. He smells like the hot chocolate he’s started drinking at night when he can’t sleep, worrying about Matt being daredevil, and can’t afford to have either booze or caffeine so late, like paper and printer ink from the office, a trace of Karen’s perfume where he hugged her goodbye, Chinese take-out, dollar store no-tears unscented baby shampoo.

Matt expects not to fall asleep, to take what rest he can lying surrounded in the familiarity of his best friend, but he’s unconscious between one breath and the next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For my all my homestucks out there, this fic is totally Frank<3Matt<>Foggy in my head.
> 
> For the rest of you, IGNORE THAT. Matt and Foggy are rather codependent, touchy-feely friends as per canon. /whistles


	2. Chapter 2

They tell you, in trauma recovery, to focus on what you have. 

Matt has - 

He has a gentle, patient, supportive best friend who understands Matt has some weird needs and who keeps coming back, after everything Matt puts him through. Who didn’t want to let Matt come to work today, but - Matt doesn’t want to just lie around thinking about it. He _has_ their practice, which he is. So _fucking_ proud of. He pauses to run his fingers over the sign a few extra times on his way in. His fingertips will smell faintly of the metal for at least an hour. 

It hurts, sitting at his desk, but honestly not as much as he has some days. A little tearing is nothing to a cracked rib, bone grinding with every gasp of air. He sets his fingers on his refreshable display, focuses down and down. He shuts out the smells and the sounds of the dripping coffee pot in the kitchen and the faintly sulphurous hard boiled eggs belonging to the financial analyst across the hall. He sets his own twinging body aside with the same necessary disregard that he always applies to his own heartbeat, his own quietly gurgling stomach, his own endless breathing. He works, lays out a memo - _point by point_ , he thinks, mouth twitching. He needs to remember that one, Foggy will love the braille pun. 

The law is infuriating sometimes, a tangled lumbering behemoth dragging all the historical detritus of a flawed, miserably human society behind it - but it’s clean, too, at the same time, a knot he can unravel, one line at a time, a different kind of meditation, regulations and precedents transmuted into the low chant of a mantra.

His concentration wavers around lunchtime, and he can tell from the faint, regular buzz of text notifications that Foggy and Karen are colluding about something, and furthermore are probably using their phones specifically so he can’t eavesdrop. Which - don’t be a hypocrite, Murdock. It’s okay not to spy on everything your friends say. Even if they’re almost certainly texting because it’s about him. Karen’s worried, probably - who knows what his face is doing today - and Foggy is - he wouldn’t _tell_ her -

His hands are clenched on the desk when Foggy sticks his head in, Karen’s heels clicking away down the block on some brisk errand. “Hey,” Foggy says, gently but not _too_ gently, like an easy shoulder nudge transmuted to a word in his mouth. 

“How are you holding up?”

Matt’s fingers curl on the edge of his desk, empty where he would normally clench them around his cane, propped out of the way. He bites the inside of his cheek, wills himself not to snap.

“I’m still not made of glass, you know.” There, he thinks. That was - level. Reasonable.

“You’re not made of stone either, buddy,” Foggy says, but he sounds more fond than sad, and that helps. Exasperation, Matt’s used to. He doesn’t want pity. 

“You don’t have to tiptoe around me,” Matt says, swallows, tries not to make it an accusation. “I’m not -”

He isn’t sure how he planned to end that sentence.

“I know, Matt,” Foggy answers, too gentle now, and Matt grits his teeth against something wild and unbalanced that wants to come whirling out of him, _what do you know, how do you know when I don’t, tell me what I’m not, Foggy, tell me I’m not traumatized or broken or weak, say you it coward -_

“I mean, if you were, I’m pretty sure fancy crepes wouldn’t help. You know, from that place on 54th with the fresh berries you like?”

Foggy is better at catching him off-guard than criminals. Matt picks up his presence from a block away at the least, but somehow Foggy still gets in under his guard every time.

“What?”

“The place, you know, what’s it called -“

“You can’t fix this with blackberries, Foggy.”

There Foggy is, right next to him, not crowding him exactly, just - close. Matt breathes him in, ink and morning coffee and fabric softener. “I’m not trying to fix anything, Matt. You’re not broken.”

 _Truth_.

“I just want you to have something nice to smile about, maybe. If you feel like it.”

Matt already does.

“I walked four blocks and back in heels for this, Murdock,” Karen says when he tries to demur with a similar line upon her return. “I get that hand-whipped cream infused with rum is probably against your ninja code or some shit but being strong doesn’t actually mean never feeling it when you get hurt.”

There’s a little bit of a quaver to her voice, too small for anyone else to hear. Karen does this - refuses to dance around Matt's stoicism the way he's mostly trained Foggy to do. She wears her own vulnerability like a heraldic shield; she makes them more human simply by her presence, by her own unfaltering humanity. “Now pick the best smelling one or I’m eating them all myself.”

“Thank you, Miss Page,” Matt says, obeying. They crowd together in Matt’s office to savor the treat together, and it feels - not as much like surrender as he expected. More like unwrapping his hands after a long session with the bag, the stretch, the exhale, the _ritardando_ of his heart returning to a resting rate.

Matt throws some of it up in the bathroom later, when he hears a click from an upstairs lockbox latch that reminds him of _that fucking switchblade_ with a jarring, intimate immediacy. His own sweat stings faintly in the cuts under the bandages as he kneels on the tile. He breathes and breathes and listens to Foggy and Karen, milling, still concerned, but safe, mostly content, and then he rinses his mouth out and goes back to work.

*

Frank sleeps rough for – he’s not sure, a couple days, at least. Eats cold pizza out of a dumpster when hunger finally beats down disgust, inevitable as the sunrise. At some point a policeman tells him to move it along, shifts uncomfortably rather than looming. Tentatively offers Frank the address of a VA center in the neighborhood. Frank grunts something he hopes sounds vaguely grateful, but shuffles the other way.

He can’t – he can’t go back, is the thing. There’s a neatly-made cot and bottled water and a quiet windowless room waiting for him, for the man he used to be, full of cash and clean weapons and boxes of ammunition sorted by caliber and monsters pressed flat between files. They aren’t good places, his bolt holes, but they’re _for_ something good. For the only good thing he had left. For justice. Bringing what he is now into one of them would be – a mockery. Would break some kind of trust. And he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. So.

He walks. And sleeps. And tries not to think about anything at all.

It doesn’t work terribly well. He never realized how much waging a war took up his _time_.

Any trust worth anything is already broken, he reminds himself. He’s been lazing around for – who knows. Too long. Time to suck it up. So he picks up his files and his burners and a few handguns that fit in a rucksack, but he doesn’t sleep there, doesn’t stay, doesn’t ruin the ruler-straight lines of the sheets on the cot. He finds a working girl with a bad bruise under decent concealer one shade too yellow for her and a distinctive wince when she coughs – ribs healing from something.

He asks if she’ll be in worse trouble if he kills her pimp, and she laughs in a cracked, disbelieving sort of way that almost makes him smile. It’s a sound he can understand. She says no, and calls him a gentleman, and shows all her teeth without smiling back, like she’s daring him to make her a liar by asking for payment in trade.

She is a liar, but he doesn’t tell her so. He just goes to work. Moves into the dead man’s shitty apartment, brings over the rest of his arsenal in repeated trips, because _waste not_. He won’t be here too long. He just needs a target.

*

“Latte?” Father Lantom asks, but Matt twists his cane in both hands, shakes his head. 

“I think I need the box today.”

The dark doesn’t do anything for Matt, of course, but it smells familiar, wood and polish and old nervousness; it muffles noise from the outside a little bit, and the bench is worn so smooth under his fingers.

“I was raped,” Matt says, quick and brutal and _right_ , like popping a dislocated shoulder back into the socket. He doesn’t think he could have said the words anywhere but here. But it seems smaller, once he has. Tawdry. Miserable and disgusting and - easy, consequently, to discard, except for the way it makes him feel _stupid_ , never considering - 

“You know that’s not a sin,” Father Lantom says eventually - not sharply, not too gently either. Grave. Matt wishes he could feel the divot between his eyebrows, the sturdy shape of concern. Matt breathes out slow.

“I know. I’m confessing to - pride, I think?”

“This isn’t your fault, and you didn’t deserve it.” Firmly. It doesn’t sound as cliched as it could, in his measured voice - it sounds a little bit like prayer instead, like one of the older latin chants, where the words have worn a groove into the stone floor, are stronger for years of repetition, instead of weaker.

“It’s just that I thought I’d be dead,” Matt blurts out, surprising himself even as he hears the words coming from his mouth. “If I ever - lost, that badly. If I were helpless. And I didn’t _want_ it to happen but I didn’t. Care much, either. I wouldn’t have to _deal_ with it. I didn’t - think. This.”

“Mmm. Not exactly the pinnacle of arrogance.” Unlike some of Matt’s beliefs, he doesn’t say, the obsession that he and only he can - must - save forty thousand people minimum from each other, from themselves, from entrenched and inscrutable forces. “Uncharitable, maybe. To yourself and those who care for you.”

Contrition, disclosure, satisfaction.

In the face of apathy (and cruelty, and violation, and the temptations of vengeance -) his penance is kindness, to those he has wronged: himself, the people who care for him.

“We had fresh berries in the office today,” he volunteers, not sure if he wants Father Lantom’s approval for Foggy or for himself.

“It’s a good start,” he says, and it’s not a lie. Father Lantom believes in the power of small things. Matt thinks of the warmth of disposable coffee cups in his hands, supposes he must. “But just a start. Kindness works best as a habit.”

“If you want to talk about the rest,” he adds, but Matt cuts him off.

“I don’t even know how much I care _now_ ,” because he _doesn’t_. It was awful, and it’s over. It took him by surprise - but even that’s fading now.

“Matthew -”

“I know that sounds bad,” Matt says hastily. “Especially from me. I don’t mean - I’m not _fine_.” See. He can say it. “I just - it was a bad thing that happened to my body. And I’m…sort of used to that?”

Father Lantom sighs.

“Even though I am as deserving of kindness as any of God’s creatures,” Matt recites promptly, in light of his resolution, and it comes out a little more Tiny Tim than he meant it to. When he was a kid, he could lay the sweet blind orphan piety on so thick it was in _slabs_ , and no one would doubt his sincerity. There are good habits and bad ones. Father Lantom lets the silence drag out; Matt can imagine his eyebrow slowly rising.

“I already knew that kind of evil was out there,” he says finally, more quietly. “I fought it, I’m going to keep fighting it. They didn’t change anything about me that matters, or take anything I need. I - I feel worse for the other guy who got caught up in it, than I do for me.”

When Matt's in control of his body properly again - no more bile, no thoughtless reflexive wincing - he really needs to go be kind to him, too.

*

He doesn’t, honestly, expect to see Daredevil ever again, unless he’s hunting Frank down. There are plenty of shitty neighborhoods in New York City other than Hell’s Kitchen; the least he can do is respect Daredevil’s territory.

So Frank almost shoots him when he just _drops_ in front of him, right in front of his rifle scope, even though he’s only meant to be doing surveillance right now. 

Acrobatic little shit. Frank doesn’t shoot him. Doesn’t flinch, either. He’s got new armor from somewhere, exactly the same. Almost like it never happened at all, except Daredevil is holding – tossing him – his _jacket_.

“Thanks,” Daredevil says, and then Frank _does_ flinch.

“ _Don’t_.”

Daredevil frowns. His mouth is still so fucking pretty. Frank kind of wants to gouge his eyes out. This is probably insensitive. All things considered. 

He doesn’t look away. Not out of some farce of politeness, but because he does expect Daredevil to kick him in the head eventually, and deep combat instincts insist he be alert enough to see it coming, even though he knows Daredevil has him outclassed, even though he doesn’t plan to resist. He’s more likely to struggle reflexively if he _doesn’t_ pay attention, so.

“Took me awhile to find you.” Frank has no idea what that tone means. He slings the jacket on, since that seems - implied, prompted, expected. Something. 

“This doesn’t have to be complicated,” he looks at his rifle when Daredevil fails to close distance. Remembers to look back at Daredevil again. “Just. Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it.” Turn himself in, fight, kill, die. Leave the city for good. Whatever. _Whatever_. It all means _I’m sorry_ but he thinks if he tries to say something that pointless he’ll just start screaming, and he never did figure out how to stop anything once he starts. So it’s gratingly offered carte blanche instead. Nothing can make up for what he did, but if Daredevil asks –

“Take a _fucking shower_ ,” Daredevil growls after a moment. “I can practically smell you from the west side.”

(There’s that laugh again. Bristling and toothy. He’s going to choke on it, one of these days. The world is broken and crazy as ever and the laugh knows every secret. He gulps it down before it can escape.)

Daredevil jumps off the roof, catches a rung, hauls himself away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So much love to everyone who commented and waited on this! 2016 has been a crazy year so far (mostly good, but crazy) but I am definitely still committed to finishing this. I appreciate every one of you even when I am too shy to reply. 
> 
> I am on tumblr at [spaceshipoftheseus](spaceshipoftheseus.tumblr.com)!


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